Ned Desmond

Ned Desmond is the COO of TechCrunch and CrunchBase and General Manager of AOL Tech which includes Engadget, TUAW and Joystiq.

Previously he was the founder and president of GoSportn, an enthusiast media company, which launched GoFISHn.com and GoHUNTn.com.

Prior to GoSportn, Desmond was head of digital at Time Inc. for six years, founder of eCompany Now (later merged with Business 2.0), and held senior management roles at Disney and Infoseek. He launched Infoseek Japan with Joi Ito, which was acquired in 2000 by Rakuten.

He came to Silicon Valley in 1996 after working for nearly a decade in Asia as a correspondent for Time magazine.

Latest from Ned Desmond

In case you haven’t heard, TechCrunch is celebrating its 10th anniversary with a meetup at the Presidio’s Civil War Parade Ground this Saturday, June 6. There are easily 10 good reasons to be there. We’ve mentioned most in earlier posts, but there’s a new one. Read More

Anyone working in the startup world knows intuitively that women are not well represented in technical or founder roles — and that quantifying the issue is difficult because data is so scarce.
In 2013, Pinterest technologist Tracy Chou famously highlighted the issue in her post, “Where are the numbers?, which exposed the lack of published data from startups and mainstream tech… Read More

The Europas European Tech Startups Awards is an annual celebration of Europe’s brightest tech companies. From modest beginnings in a small bar in central London in 2009, our own Mike Butcher has helped grow The Europas into a major media event, gathering together many key startup players in Europe. Read More

If you have not already heard, we hosted the Crunchies awards show at San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall last Thursday. Some elements of the show have been criticized for being inappropriate.
If you were present, or watching the livestream, you might have been startled, if not offended, by some of the remarks that the host, standup comedian T.J. Miller made on stage. It’s… Read More

TechCrunch has a big international readership, and we all know there are no geographical boundaries to the startup revolution. No country has ridden that wave better than China, where huge markets, a red-hot economy, a controversial governmental hand and plenty of technologists and entrepreneurs have delivered a huge number of new companies, including giants Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba. Read More

That crunching sound you hear is software eating the world, and TechCrunch is always looking for ways to pull a chair up to the feast. For example, we have CrunchBase for data and CrunchBoard for jobs, and once upon a time there was CrunchPad, too. Not everything works out, but today with high hopes we are launching CrunchU, which is a collection of 30 online courses Read More

We knew CrunchBase was big. We knew because there are 2 million people using the startup database each month. We knew because more than 120k people have contributed 1.6MM data points on companies, entrepreneurs, fundings, exits and more. What we didn’t know, however, was what the investment community thinks about CrunchBase. Read More